Pigeons on your tod

There lately appeared in the correspondence column of a London newspaper a letter warning us to beware of ivy. Some varieties — so said the lady writer — were extremely poisonous to touch and the unsuspected cause of distressing skin ailments. Moreover, she declared that the best thing to do with ivy was to root it up as a “harmful and foul-smelling weed”.

Needless to say, this lady had confused our harmless common ivy, , with the exotic importations of a quite different species called poison ivy. Rash horticulturalists of the past generation brought it in from the